Shadowrun Returns - Two Interviews

TechZWN: This game is being labeled as an indie title, but has actually been a long time franchise. When working for the project, does it feel more like a more humble indie game production or something larger?

Gitelman: Shadowrun has been around a long time but you can’t quite label it a franchise because it’s gone through so many owners and developers. It hasn’t been controlled by one company for many years. Harebrained Schemes has no publisher and no marketing department. We work directly for our players. As I look around the room at our team of tired developers, I can tell you – it feels really indie to me.

TechZWN: I noticed on the provided website there will be conversation editing and character editing. Will this be done in Unity or another package? Will this editor be free of charge? Does Harebrained Schemes intend in seeing a lot of user mods for this title?

Gitelman: There’s far more than conversation and character editing! We’re releasing our complete game editor – exactly the same tools we’re using to make the games. In addition, we’re releasing the entire campaign in the editor so you can see how it was built and borrow as much as you need to jump-start your own creations. The editor comes with the game on Windows and Mac and we hope to see a ton of community created content for it! Here’s some of the stuff our Kickstarter Backers are already making with the early release version they got a couple of weeks ago

"Basically, the game masters can create any story, any adventure they want," Weisman told Shacknews. "The only limitations are that this is not an open-world system. From the beginning, we said it wasn't an open world. It is based on narrative and Shadowruns. You create a series of runs that can have all sorts of interdepencies with each other and you can create hub locations, like we have in our campaign, that can give you access to the runs. We've published as part of our Seattle campaign, and later with Berlin, a huge amount of building blocks to be able to build environments, both exterior and interior."

In addition to using the game's own assets, Weisman says that they'll also give creators the ability to make their own assets. "We are also going to release a kind of art guide for people that want to build their own environmental building blocks," he explained. "The editor has support for you to bring in and use your own art for your environments. That will be there as more of an unsupported feature, because there's a lot more that goes into bring art in. But if people want to do that, the mechanism exists for doing that on the environments."

"Ultimately, what's played around the tabletop is a world that is created by the game master and the players," said Weisman. "We don't view our campaign as *the* story for Shadowrun, we view it as just the first story for Shadowrun. It's just a building block for everything else.